1 Keeping It Transparent
If you plan to send emails to prospective clients using email as a sales promotion tool, it is key that you announce your intentions early to differentiate your emails from the many spam emails that drown email in-boxes. One of the best ways to do this is to announce your company name, year it was established, postal address, telephone number and contact email address within your email and not forgetting the unsubscribe link. It is rare that spam email contains such transparent information and it reassures your prospective customer of your authenticity and clarifies your intentions.
2 Make your unsubscribe link obvious
Many email newsletters hide the Unsubscribe link making it hard for the customer to unsubscribe. The best practice is to make it obvious and include it at the start of the footer in your email newsletter. It takes 0.3 seconds to delete an email and 20 seconds to Unsubscribe. If you customer is having to spend time to get off your email list, they are unlikely to appreciate you making it hard to do and it will have a negative impact on your brand. Make it as easy as possible for non-interested subscribers to leave.
3 Email Newsletters: Conform, Don’t Reinvent
Larger organizations and Government Departments have a tendency to allow each of their departments to send their email newsletters specific to their cause. However, in many cases each department is actually targeting the same customers as their colleagues upstairs. The argument is always that they have so much to say that they need to send their own newsletter. In some circumstances this can create email apathy as the poor subscriber gets multiple emails from the same origination telling them about everything from the latest offer to their HR appointments.
In many cases, a single well-timed weekly newsletter can accommodate the anchor story from each department and drive traffic to their micro site or coveted corner of the corporate site. Like newspapers and web sites, email newsletters have a defined style that is considered best practice. Conforming to this style does not mean your creativity needs to be stifled, but best practice has shown that better content rules over non-standard creative interface designs.
Inclusion of Anchor Tag headlines for each story in your newsletter at the top means the recipient can see the headlines from your newsletter in their preview pane and click down to the story that is of interest to them.
This will bring the user to the story of interest within the email. This should be a short encouraging paragraph including a <more> link. The call to action is to get the reader to go to the relevant page on your web site to read the rest of the story. This way we can track their interactions with the newsletter and judge success of content based upon click through rates.
4 Keep it short
Remember email marketing is the most effective tool for driving traffic to your web site. It is not the environment to deliver long-winded sales propositions or company news. It should be considered as a flyer promoting your site. The call-to-action within any email should be to get more people to engage with your web presence.
The best way to promote your web site is to ensure that the content within your email is relevant, short and accessible. The title of your stories or promotions should appear in the preview window of a normal email client and easily guide the user to a more detailed paragraph within the email or straight to your web site. Typically email marketing works well in conjunction with a Content Management driven web site allowing for easy creation of new content.
5 Make sure your email reads well without images
Modern email clients like Microsoft Outlook by default block the downloading of images within non-trusted HTML emails. The reason for this is to protect the recipients’ privacy. When images are downloaded, email-marketing systems track this as an email opened. This means that your email can appear as a series of blank boxes.
In Outlook 2007, even the Alt Tags usually used to define the image before it downloads, are not shown. It is key that it is obvious within seconds what your email is promoting even before the images are downloaded.
This example is from Clickz, a daily digest of top tips in email marketing. Note that the headlines are visible and content can be read without downloading images. The email obviously looks better with the intended images, but the reader can choose to download images if the content is relevant.
Before images are downloaded
The same newsletter after images are downloaded.
6 Choose Your Success Factors Carefully
“We get 1,000,000 hits per month to our web site”. In days gone by, “hits” was the measurement of success for web masters and marketing managers. Thankfully sense in the industry has in general removed this outrageous measurement technique.
Open Rates within email marketing campaigns are also a dubious figure. The fact that all text in an email can be read without ever registering if it has been opened means that in the world of detailed stats and overwhelming metrics, open rates are an inaccurate figure. The only real relevance it has is to allow you to compare percentage open rates from email-blast to email-blast to see if your readership is in general terms increasing or decreasing. It is possible that someone downloaded the images in the email but still didn’t read it.
A much more accurate metric to use is click through rate. This is typically a 100% accurate metric and it is also a good determining factor of success. Someone has engaged with your message. Someone wants to know more and is visiting your web site.
Build your success factors on click through rates and other success factors such as sales leads produced or widgets sold. Quoting open-rates is equal to quoting hits statistics on your web site.
7 Avoid Forward to Friend as a list building technique
Why would I build a forward-to-friend button into my HTML template? I have a built in forward to a friend button built right at the top of my email client, and it auto-populates with my friends email address. So, if we instinctively forward an email using the forward button why do some email marketers insist on trying to list build using forward to friend built right into the email template?
Work on smarter, more creative techniques for creating viral mail and list building.
8 Use Call-to-Action Triggers to Enhance the Customer Experience
Depending on your business and what you are promoting; it can be a smart idea to include auto-triggers in your email to enhance your customer experience. For example, if a user wants further information on a product or service, they simply click a link in the email. The email marketing system then informs the sales team of the request and direct dialogue can take place.
If a recipient of an email clicks on a product of interest, why not have an automated email going out an hour/a day/a week later with greater detail on the product?
A customer engaging with your brand, your product or your services should find it easy to get the content they need; you can make this easier for your customer by way of automatic triggers based upon their actions and will only strengthen your relationship with them.
9 Include integrated Metrics for Better Marketing Feedback
Email marketing should be used to promote sales, services and content on your web site. Using in-built email marketing/web site tracking tools it is possible to track users from your email through your web site, awarding them points for the key pages they land on. As they progress and hit these pages their total number of points increases. This allows you to view not only who clicked on links in your email campaign, but also to how interested they became in your web site. From here you can refine follow up email campaigns based upon areas of interest shown by your subscribers and sort out the most interested parties for follow up action.
10 Think Email Campaign Strategy not Single Email Blast
Like any form of marketing; email is not a golden bullet. It takes time to build up relationships on-line and to gain the valuable attention of a customer. Many organizations send out email when sales are slack or when the marketing manager gets time to fit it into their schedule. Email Marketing should be treated as key function of the marketing process and a strategy should exist on how you would like it to change your business.
Key functions that should be considered when creating an email marketing strategy include a detailed list building strategy, the story you are going to tell over time, how you are going to segment and follow up any opportunities that arise and most importantly of all, how you are going to keep your mailing regular and not just do one off email blasts |
